Tallulah: My Autobiography

By Tallulah Bankhead

Her father and her uncle were U.S. congressmen. Her grandfather was a U.S. senator. Although born to privilege in Alabama and groomed in a convent school, Tallulah Bankhead resolved not to be just another southern belle.

Quickly she rose to the top and became an acclaimed actress of London's West End and on the Broadway stage. Her performances in many plays of the 1920s brought her to the notice of Hollywood. She starred in such Paramount films as My Sin, Faithless, The Devil and the Deep, and Thunder Below. Even though she won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for her leading role in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), she never achieved the prominence in movies that she enjoyed in the theater and on radio. On the New York stage she originated the starring roles of Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and of Sabina in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.

Tallulah, like Eudora, Flannery, and Coretta, was a southern woman identifiable by her first name. Her flamboyant public personality may be the most fully realized and memorable character Bankhead ever played. She became famous for her snappy repartee, candid quotes, and scandalous lifestyle. She was disposed to remove her clothes and chat in the nude. Overfond of Kentucky bourbon and wild parties, she was a lady baritone who called everybody “Dahling.”

In Tallulah, first published in 1952 and a New York Times bestseller for twenty-six weeks, Bankhead's literary voice is as lively and forthright as her public persona. She details her childhood and adolescence, discusses her dedication to the theater, and presents amusing anecdotes about her life in Hollywood, New York, and London. Along with a searing defense of her lifestyle and rambunctious habits, she provides a fiercely opinionated, wildly funny account of American stage at a time when the movies were beginning to cast theater into eclipse. This is not only a memoir of an independent woman but also an inside look at American entertainment during a golden age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jan 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781496853752

Tallulah Bankhead

Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968) headlined NBC's The Big Show, a ninety-minute weekly radio extravaganza that aired from 1950 to 1952. In 1965 she appeared in her last movie, a British film titled Fanatic (Die, Die, My Darling! in U.S. release).

Book preview

Tallulah

my autobiography

Tallulah Bankhead

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

JACKSON

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2004 by the Estate of Tallulah Bankhead

First published in 1952 by Harper & Brothers

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bankhead, Tallulah, 1902–1968.

Tallulah : my autobiography / Tallulah Bankhead

p. cm. — (Southern icons series)

Originally published New York : Harper and Brothers, 1952.

ISBN 1-57806-635-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Bankhead, Tallulah, 1902–1968. 2. Actors—United States—Biography. I. Title. II. Series.

PN2287.B17A3 2004

792.02’8’092—DC22

2004041907

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Daddy

Contents

1. Exercise on the Trapeze

2. Echoes of My Childhood

3. Nibbling at Fame

4. Flirtation with Sin

5. Invasion of the British Isles

6. Ambushed by Somerset Maugham

7. Tales of London Town

8. Portraits and Pranks

9. Duels with the Screen

10. Touch and Go on Broadway

11. Regina and Sabina

12. Chez Moi with Zoo

13. Creed of a Random Voter

14. Loose Amid the Microphones

15. Affidavit of the Accused

16. Motion to Adjourn

Postscript

Index

A CITATION

to Richard Maney

For Conduct Above and Beyond the Call of Duty

Tallulah

1.

Exercise on the Trapeze

Despite all you may have heard to the contrary, I have never had a ride in a patrol wagon.

I have milked a mammoth, and I travel with adjustable window screens. I have been up in a balloon with Sir Nigel Playfair, and down in a submarine with Gary Cooper. I have scaled an elephant in a St. Louis zoo, and christened an electric rabbit with a jeroboam of Lanson 1912. I have clerked behind a counter with Margot Asquith, and sung duets with Margaret Truman. Charged with two double-daiquiris I have churned with the conviction that I can do the Indian rope trick.

My voice has been likened to the mating call of the caribou, and to the haunting note of a Strad. Apostates have hinted that I’m the ill-begotten daughter of Medusa and the Marquis de Sade. As against these slanders there are the hymns of my champions, equally inaccurate, that I’m a fusion of Annie Laurie, Bopeep, Florence Nightingale and whichever waif Lillian Gish played in The Orphans of the Storm. Somewhere in between these contrary verdicts lies the truth. With Montaigne I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older.

I’ve had tea with Uoyd George, tiffin with Ramsay MacDonald, and I’ve aced Greta Garbo on Clifton Webb’s court. Forced to vote for a Davis, I’ll take Jefferson and give you Bette. To the consternation of the world of science my endorsement once glowed on the jacket of a book by Sir James Hapwood Jeans, great English astronomer. In it he was speculating on the age of stars—in the heavens rather than on the stage. To please the Maharanee of Cooch Behar I once togged myself out in a sari, and I won five pounds from Lord Birkenhead when he bet that Cleopatra was a brunette. Later I sued Birkenhead’s daughter, Lady Eleanor Smith, for libel. She wrote in Lord Rothermere’s London Dispatch that I was an Anglophobe. What’s more, I collected.

I slept fitfully in Kimbolton, the haunted castle in which Henry VIII locked up Catherine of Aragon, and I suffer from chronic anemia. (Just a minute while I take a look at the ticker! I want to get the last quotation on Billy Rose, common. Here it is. Nothing asked and nothing bid.) I’ve played Newcastle-on-Tyne and Terre Haute, Indiana, and when the London News Chronicle sought to rouse the parish with Do Brainy People Play Bridge? I took the affirmative along with H. G. Wells and Rose Macaulay, with Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy dissenting.

Under oath I’d like to refute the canard that I’m an old chum of Winston Churchill’s—a fable that constantly bobs up in print. But he did come to see me five times when I was playing in Fallen Angels.

I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone. My inability to cope with these prejudices leads to complications, excesses and heresies frowned upon in stuffier circles, circles I avoid as I would exposure to the black pox. My caprices, born of my fears, frequently find a vent in the romantic pursuits, enthusiasms and experiments at odds with the code affirmed by Elsie Dinsmore.

Over-stimulated, more than once I have breached the peace, curdled the night with monologues, war cries and filibusters. These violations of established order might well land a less artful dodger in the clink, but in these crises my acting skill (isn’t it a little early to start bragging?) stands me in good stead. Jug Tallulah, the toast of the Yangtze and the Yukon? What constable would wax so bold?

Testifying for the defense may I add that I’ve only been married once, a humdrum record in a profession where husbands come and go like express trains between New York and Philadelphia. By way of compensation my sister Eugenia has been hitched seven times, three times to the same victim. The Bankhead girls strike a high average, even by the standards of Peggy Joyce.

Are you haunted by those adjustable window screens cited in my first sentence? On tour I carry them that my parakeet, Gaylord, may have Lebensraum. He sulks when caged, and I sulk in a room without ventilation. You’ll hear more about Gaylord. He was named in good faith for that gambler in Show Boat, but whoever speculated on his sex was mad as an adagio dancer. He’s a she.

I loathe acting. Unless the sheriff barges in to drag out my piano I’ll never act on a stage again. Above the members of any other profession actors are slaves to the clock. Who cares if a politician, a policeman or a college professor comes to work late? He can plead a hangover or other occupational wound and get away with it. At most he’ll get a slight reprimand, the frown of a superior. But in theaters curtains go up at eight-thirty, or thereabouts, and come down around eleven. Woe betide the star who flouts this time bracket. She is looked upon as a traitor to her class, a jade who through whim or amnesia, has let both the audience and the management down, a cross between Lucrezia Borgia and Mata Hari. I once played a performance in Clash by Night when a jump ahead of an oxygen tent—temperature 105 degrees. The slogan the show must go on is one of the daffiest, one of the most illogical, ever coined.

I detest acting because it is sheer drudgery. In the thirty-three years that I’ve been on the stage I have appeared in thirty-five plays—only three of which had any merit. I’ve been a star since I played in Conchita in London in 1924, and a star enjoys privileges and rewards beyond those given less fortunate players. No aspirant for fame and its alloys was ever more stage-struck than I when I tore up from the South to joust with the Broadway windmills. But once I achieved stardom, the whole apparatus of the theater palled on me.

The humiliation of being in a poor play, of playing a shabby role, of appearing before disgruntled audiences, if any, of being curdled by hostile reviews, can outrage all human dignity. Being caught in a long-run success is almost as bad. The fearful monotony, the boredom of saying the same words every night, at the same minute, has unhinged the mind of more than one actress.

The author writes a play, then is through with it, aside from collecting royalties. Four weeks of rehearsing and the director’s work is done. Theirs are creative jobs. But how would the author feel if he had to write the same play over each night for a year? Or the director restage it before each performance? They’d be as balmy as Nijinsky in a week. Even the ushers traffic with different people every night. But the actress? She’s a caged parrot.

Though I say it who shouldn’t, I was born an actress. I never had any formal instruction, never cased a drama school. Acting is an astonishingly easy profession. I’ve given no more thought to my best roles than I have to my worst. Asked about my technique, I grow evasive. I’m not aware I have any. I’m violating no confidences, least of all my own, when I say my performances have saved many a frowzy charade, prolonged their runs long beyond their deserts. I have a dark suspicion that only ersatz actors can explain the thing called technique. I could list a hundred right here, but there is little to be gained by starting a riot so early. I have enough feuds on my hands.

Between you and me, the critics don’t know a great deal about acting, either. The more experienced and scholarly can detect feeble plays without a Geiger counter, even though occasionally they hail as masterpieces items which offend the nose of the property man.

Well-met fellows, they, and hale, if I may plagiarize the style of the Henry Luce periodicals. I’m talking about those powerful and capricious gentlemen who sit in judgment on New York’s stage entertainment. I’ve had considerable traffic with these magistrates, professional and otherwise. With them I’ve broken bread, slaked a common thirst, plumbed Gordon Craig, debated the architecture of an ingénue, palavered over the lunatic whims of my employers. On the whole I find them a stimulating, if erratic crew. Gordon Craig? He is the son of Ellen Terry. He renounced acting to bring new magic to scene designing.

Though all of them ooze integrity, they have chinks in their armor through which you could drive a Greyhound bus. Some have high standards, approach a play their heads ringing with the Greek unities. Some have low standards, think in terms of Minsky-cummarten. Some have standards that would embarrass the readers of The Police Gazette. One or two are hell-bent on a revival of Sherlock Holmes, even if they have to dig up William Gillette to play his original role. In varying degrees they love the theater, though their passion is not always reciprocated. Scorn for the opinions of fellow critics is their common bond.

A visitor reading all the reviews the day after a New York opening would arrive at the conclusion that these men had not all seen the same play, so conflicting are their judgments. Rarely does a drama, a comedy or a musical get a unanimous verdict. Louis Kronenberger, one of the best equipped of the critics, turned in a sour report on South Pacific. Wolcott Gibbs is allergic to Shakespeare. In general they know what they like, express their opinions in words that reflect their background, taste and experience. The charge that they’re biased and prejudiced is of no consequence. Criticism is the distillation of bias and prejudice. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Most of them can distinguish between a hawk and a handsaw, but they’re easily swindled by a showy performance. Frequently they confuse a role and its player, fail to observe that the last named has not realized on the potential of the first. A great part is no less great because it’s indifferently played.

Proof? When Maurice Evans appeared in New York in Shakespeare’s Richard II, the reviewers hosannaed him as the finest actor of our time. Now Mr. Evans is a competent and articulate player, but that verdict was sheer rubbish. Up to the time of Evans’ performance there had been only a half-dozen professional showings of Richard II in New York in its stage history. Most of the critics, and most of the audience, were hearing the play’s magnificent poetry for the first time. It was like a Shakespearean first night. The words that came from Mr. Evans’ mouth were so memorable, so magical, that critics and audience alike cheered him as if he were a double Barrymore. In their rapture, they did not distinguish between the Bard and his instrument. There is a distinction. Every actor in the land, including Lou Holtz, wants to play Hamlet. The urge is understandable. The Dane is sure-fire, but the actor who plays him may have rents in his doublet.

Playing Hamlet or another of Shakespeare’s classic heroes is no guarantee of immortality. You have this on the authority of an actress who risked his Cleopatra only to escape by a hair the fate of Custer. Alec Guinness, one of the most brilliant actors of our time, in 1951 set himself up as Hamlet in London. Mr. Guinness is a thinker as well as an actor—a fusion encountered as seldom as Halley’s comet. After much consideration, he decided to play the Dane with a beard. He won’t do it again. The hue and cry was deafening. It couldn’t have been more indignant had he tried to snatch Prince Charley. You can’t play ducks and drakes with tradition in England. Had David Garrick or Sir Henry Irving or Beerbohm Tree profaned Hamlet with whiskers? No! Then let’s have no more of such hanky-panky!

Where was I before I got tangled up with Shakespeare? Oh, yes! The theater! And the critics! I should be the last woman to thumb my nose at the gentlemen whose judgments make or break a play in New York. They have treated me handsomely. But two or three of them write with a chisel. Trying to fathom their verdicts I sometimes get the impression they’re writing in code, that the editor has failed to supply the key to same.

There are a lot of things about the theater that bore me stiff: trying on costumes, being photographed, going to hairdressers, dieting that I may not overlap the costumes, the wretched dressing rooms, the overheated theaters, the grim mutes who make up benefit audiences who, for all their concern with charity, can’t be thawed out with an acetylene torch.

And there’s still another reason why the theater is not the glamorous, exciting and mysterious profession it’s been branded ever since the Hallams started their impersonations down in John Street, Manhattan, in the 1700’s. Acting is the most insecure of all the trades, the most risky. In their professional lifetime most actors rehearse longer than they play, spend more time traipsing from office to office in search of jobs than they rehearse and play combined.

In a survey for the year ending June 1, 1951, Actors Equity Association revealed that over that span a sixth of the membership found no employment in the theater. Those who worked averaged a ten-week season. Their average income was $790. Of these fortunates only one in eight made as much as $5,000. The survey ended with this official warning: Anyone primarily concerned with earning a living by his profession should try elsewhere than the theater.

It–s one of the tragic ironies of the theater that only one man in it can count on steady work—the night watchman. Insurance companies insist on his year-round employment. A bank teller or a bus driver has more security than anyone in my business. Assured of continuous work at a fixed wage, they can adjust their scale of living to their incomes.

The star? One season I’m in a New York hit, making what’s left of four or five thousand a week after the Collector of Internal Revenue is through hacking at it. I begin to feel my oats, start to toss money about as though the play was to run forever. My expenses skyrocket. A victim of self-hypnosis, I get a rude awakening the following season when trapped in a stinker which opens and closes like a camera shutter after four weeks’ rehearsal and rancid tryouts in New Haven or Wilmington or Boston. Plummeting from four thousand a week to nothing a week is quite a plummet, calls for adjustments that send the adjuster scurrying to the pawnshop.

Since mid-April of 1947 I have played only one role in the theater—Amanda Prynne in Noel Coward’s Private Lives. I played it for an entire summer in Chicago, while wracked with neuritis; for an entire season in New York. I played it in summer theaters, in Shrine mosques, in school auditoriums, in a blizzard in Minneapolis, in a coma in Westport. I played it in Passaic, in Flatbush, in Pueblo, in Cedar Rapids, in Peoria, in the Bronx, in Joplin, in thunder, lightning and in rain (Macbeth), in towns known but to God and Rand-McNally. Unless my abacus is out of order I impersonated Amanda—a Riviera doxy of a bigamous turn—for over two hundred weeks, hither and yon, as well as in Montgomery, Alabama, flying the Confederate flag.

Does my squawk seem ungracious, in view of the steady and profitable employment given me by play and part? Hear me out before you condemn me. I played Amanda out of necessity, because I couldn’t get any other part to play. I played her to escape debtor’s prison. Private Lives was first produced in America in 1931—with Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in the leading roles. Noel is a man of courage and independence. He and Gertie played it for six months, withdrew when it was still a sellout at the Times Square Theatre because they were bored to death.

Now actresses, modern playwrights being either delinquent, sterile or frying fish in Hollywood, often add to their prestige, bolster up their budgets, by enlisting in a revival—something out of Ibsen, Sheridan or that rake from Stratford. This feigned interest in the classics adds a cachet to their reputations. But no actress in her right mind, least of all Tallulah, elects to toil in the renewal of so feathery a trifle as Private Lives from choice. Creating a role is an actress’s most rewarding experience. To duplicate, with such variations as suggest themselves, a role created by another, is not my idea of Paradise.

So, darlings, when you read that a stage star has fled the reservation, bolted to Hollywood or taken a stance before a microphone or the TV cameras, don’t judge her hastily. It isn’t a case of infidelity, it’s a case of survival. Percy Hammond, in my judgment the most amusing critic, the greatest stylist in his field, once observed: The theater is the shell game of the arts. Bravo, Percy!

In view of my scorn for the theater, its practices and delinquencies, why have I continued to act in it for thirty years? I have no alternate profession. Lobster-trapping? Placer-mining? Smuggling? I haven’t the muscles, the equipment or the nerve. How many actors could make fifty dollars a week were all forms of amusement barred by edict? Harpo Marx? He could strum his lyre on a ferry boat and pass the hat. Alfred Lunt might make out as a chef. He’s skilled at soufflés and similar ambrosia. Leo Genn, one of the prosecutors of the fiends who ran the infamous concentration camp at Belsen, could practice law. Billy Gaxton prospers from a perfume sideline. Barry Fitzgerald might return to the Dublin desk at which he sat during his seventeen years in civil service, and Charles Laughton resume greeting behind a hotel desk. But these boys are exceptions. What screen cowboy could qualify for the mounted police? I’ll lay you three to one Hopalong What’s-His-Name would flunk the simplest test.

Should I later repudiate any part of this sermon on the theater, its agues and its agonies, remember I’m supposed to be mercurial! Honey-haired, cello-voiced, mercurial Tallulah, that’s me! There is evidence to support the argument that some of my decisions and judgments are open to suspicion. An example: Back in February of 1928 I was impersonating Daphne Manning, daughter of an antique dealer, in Blackmail. Miffed because her intended had given her a brushoff, Daphne sought solace with a young artist in his studio. This was a tactical error. The juvenile Rembrandt, inflamed by her aromas and contours, sought to despoil her. Dismayed at his animal action, Daphne snatched up a breadknife and cut the culprit’s throat from ear to ear.

The London critics took a dim view of these shenanigans but my disciples in the gallery carried on as though I had kicked a field goal to beat Princeton. In the midst of this delirium I was approached by Max Beaverbrook—Lord Beaverbrook to you—waving sheaves of pound notes. Would I write my confessions for his Sunday Epepress? Though I had little to confess, though my prose had not aroused the envy of Rebecca West or Victoria May Sackville-West, I agreed. The sight of so much folding money scuttled my scruples. My Confessions will never occupy a shelf with those of Jean Jacques Rousseau or Thomas de Quincey, but they are notable for the final sentence of the last installment:

I shall never write another life story, even if I live a hundred years. So you, like me, are about to enjoy a holiday, as I cannot be a hundred until after a.d. 2000.

Here it’s only 1952 and again I’m doing a duet with the perpendicular pronoun.

I would be an ingrate and a liar did I give the impression that I’ve never had any thrills in the theater. There’s a large dash of show-off in me, as there is in every actor worth his salt. I’m intoxicated by applause. It’s my nectar. For all my griping, nothing has so tingled my spine as stepping down to the foots after the fall of a first-night curtain to be greeted by the acclaim of my peers, or an approximation thereof. Let’s have no beating about the bush. Not every yahoo in a first-night seat is my peer.

For all its flaws and demands, for all its stupidities, the theater will outlive all the mechanical contraptions schemed to ape it. It has survived the bicycle, the Stutz Bearcat, the double feature, Mr. Marconi’s trinket and the tabloid newspapers. Will TV kill the theater? If the programs I have seen, save for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the ball games and fights, are any criterion, the theater need not wake up in a cold sweat. The theater will be kayoed by the vocal mirrors on the day its champions vote to interrupt the duel between Laertes and Hamlet that they may pick up a quick buck through a tribute to a deodorant, repeat the offense every ten minutes throughout the Dane’s ordeal. I’ve prowled on my hands and knees clear back through Aeschylus and Aristophanes and in twenty-five hundred years no theater man has tolerated such vandalism. Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there’s no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds. When some historian gets around to talking about its origin and growth he cannot but hint that in its pioneer phase television’s chief service was as a soporific. TV, if you ask me, has a suicide complex.

Some paragraphs back I was muttering about an alternate profession. I’m not daft enough to think, after thirty-three years in the theater, I can master another profession, even become moderately proficient in one. There’s more to it than turning on a tap. I could have been a great dancer and I propose to prove it. As I was born with acting talent, so I was born with a sense of rhythm. My body is lithe and flexible. I have considerable feline grace. (I wish I could think of another word for feline; it leaves me open to counterattack.)

I was seventeen when hired to understudy Constance Binney in Rachel Crothers’ 39 East. Can you dance? Miss Crothers asked me. Of course, I replied, otherwise I wouldn’t have applied for the job. I had seen Miss Binney in the comedy, thus knew she had to spin on her toes in the second act. Though the thought of speaking lines terrified me, I was unruffled by the ballet demands. It was a triumph of mind over matter. I gave the impression of a budding Pavlova because I felt I was one. Why? I had recently seen sub-deb service in Washington. Though pudgy and pimpled, I was the toast of the stag line at such parties as I stimulated.

Facing my first London audience in The Dancers, on the curtain’s rise I was dancing for my supper in a British Columbia saloon, on its fall the toast of Paris, a ballerina! Actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier was a perfectionist. Feeling the demands of the part might be beyond my dancing range, he sent me to a ballet teacher. Reluctantly I went to the studio—a bleak, dark and empty room. There I was greeted by a rapt young man.

The rapt young man was Léonide Massine, whose jetés and tournées and what-have-yous are discussed in hushed tones wherever balletomanes engage in their rituals. He told Sir Gerald, who in turn told me, I was a natural-born dancer, that I could have won international fame on my toes. He had discovered me fifteen years too late. Ballerinas start their spins and leaps at five. I was twenty.

Ballet dancers, out of their stylized routines, are fish out of water. On a ballroom floor they’re as awkward as other clods, muscle-bound, rhythmless. At parties I’ve danced with the likes of Lifar, Massine and Anton Dolin. All of them would have profited by a course under Arthur Murray. No rug-cutters, they!

My Charleston in The Gold Diggers, London, ’26, was hot stuff! Adele Astaire (she and Fred were then the toast of Piccadilly) said she had never seen a better dance. She was ecstatic about the cartwheel I flipped at the finish. She was going to take up dramatic acting by way of reprisal, she said. Was Adele having me on? I think so. When a dramatic actress breaks into a dance, surprise has considerable to do with the resulting applause. Remember how Alfred Lunt was cheered for his tap dance in Idiot’s Delight? The unexpected always creates a commotion in the theater. Think of the sensation Katharine Cornell would cause did she do bird calls or a turn on the trapeze!

Acting is the laziest of the professions. A ballet dancer must limber up two or three hours a day, working or idle. The great musicians practice three or four hours a day, willy-nilly. Opera singers must go easy on cigarettes, learn half a dozen languages. The demands on an actress consist in learning the role, interpreting to the best of her ability the intent of the author as outlined by the director. When not on stage? She sits around chewing her nails, waiting for the telephone to ring. She toils not, neither does she spin. She may fume. She may even read. But she doesn’t practice.

What would I do were platforms, microphones and screens denied me? That’s easy. I’d go to the races, I’d sit up all night gambling in the most convenient casino, I’d enjoy an emotional jag while suffering with the New York Giants. I might glut myself with bridge could I find players agreeable to my wayward strategies. Cooking? Writing? These require powers of concentration and industry which I don’t possess. The theater has spoiled me for the more demanding arts.

My first performance had two distinguished spectators: Orville and Wilbur Wright. Kitty Hawk was history when Aunt Marie gave them a party at her country home near Montgomery, Alabama. This was quite a shindig. The Governor was there and a great press of judges, lawyers, Congressmen and local celebrities. It was a stunt party. The guests were called upon to entertain. A Montgomery doctor fouled up Casey at the Bat, made immortal by DeWolfe Hopper. Ballad singers had their hour, and impromptu quartets. I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher. The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright. I’d like to believe they detected in me an obscure talent, but I’m afraid I won because I was the niece of the hostess. Another thing worked in my favor. I was the youngest and smallest of the contestants.

Envious of my elders, thirsty for recognition, I plotted many a ruse when Daddy, Sister and I were living at grandfather’s house in Jasper. To get me out of her hair, grandmother would bribe me to take my primers out on the lawn. This irked me. I scorned the games and assignments of children of my age. Poring over a primer was not my notion of maturity. Even then a direct actionist, I found a way out of this humiliation. Lifting two law journals from Daddy’s room, I tottered to the lawn. Flat on the grass I pored over these, unaware they were upside down. I placed myself so that I could observe passersby, note their reactions to my profundity.

As long as I can remember I dramatized everything I did. I wasn’t the only Bankhead to follow this formula. My mother, Daddy, my aunts and uncles, even my grandparents, carried out the simplest chore with a style and dash at odds with its demands. In the theater there are players who can make a production out of eating an apple, out of opening a letter. That’s the Bankheads!

My doom was sealed when I saw a girl turn cartwheels at a circus in Birmingham. A contortionist, she could bend backwards until her head was between her feet, highlight the trick by picking up a handkerchief with her teeth. This demonstration addled my mind. Within a week I mastered cartwheel and backbend, added a third stunt to my repertory, standing on my head.

Shordy I made my first parachute jump. Unthinkingly one of my relatives took me to a country fair. As a climax to the carnival a young girl in tights jumped from a balloon, her descent checked as her chute opened. My hair was on fire! Back home, I sneaked into Grandmother’s closet and snatched up her parasol. I raced to the barn, scaled to the hayloft. Clambering through the mow window, the catch on the parasol released, I took off. What followed confirmed an earlier observation of Sir Isaac Newton. I wound up flattened, my coccyx splintered. Dismayed? No whit!

Later my cartwheels were to draw official fire. Aunt Marie’s house in Montgomery stood on a corner. The street sloped sharply down within our block. This block was my arena. Engaged in a chain of cartwheels one afternoon, halfway through the block I was hailed by an elderly gentleman: Stop that, littte girl! Stop that! Come back here! Come back here! I ignored the summons, continued my revolutions to the block’s end. When I scampered back my tormenter was waiting. Didn’t you hear me when I told you to stop? Yes, sir. I did. Why didn’t you stop? Because my grandfather told me never to start anything I couldn’t finish. Oh, is that so? said my challenger. And who is your grandfather?

Senator John Hollis Bankhead, I said proudly.

Well, I’m Braxton Comer, the Governor of Alabama.

So he was. This was my first defiance of constituted power.

My dramatic urge preceded the Wright brothers, the cartwheel lady and the parachutist. Our social hub was the drugstore. Of a late afternoon the town’s bloods and belles gathered there for Cokes and sodas and gossip. Grandmother would be driven down in her four-seater surrey, wait outside while Sister and I tossed off a Coke.

On our exit, one afternoon, Grandmother was chatting with Miss Clara Novel, of the Novels of Virginia, suh! Miss Novel dressed in purple, carried a purple parasol. Later she was Daddy’s secretary in Congress. As we drove off, Miss Novel said to Grandmother: That child has the most gracious smile.

That did it. Home, I scuttled up to my bedroom, anchored myself before the mirror, then smiled and smiled and smiled. For a week I was beside myself until everyone got out of the house, that I might resume my experiments. That’s my first recollection of acting without an audience—save myself.

I was all of five when Daddy took me to Birmingham to have my tonsils removed—the start of my mezzo-basso voice. As a reward for my courage under the knife he took me to a vaudeville show. A woman single, to use a trade term, sang slightly risqué songs as she played the piano. A born mimic, I mastered her routine overnight. I still remember the final line of one song: And when he took his hat I wondered when he’d come again. Naughty? It had implications. At least Daddy thought so. He was fascinated by my impersonation. Sometimes he’d come home a little high from vin du pays—bourbon, that is—wake me up, bring me downstairs in my nightgown, stand me up on the table in the dining room, ask me to give my impression of the Birmingham lark. Then he’d roar with laughter.

I reacted violently to applause, to recognition from my elders. The dining room was only used for large family dinners. Usually we ate in the breakfast room. Atop that rarely used table, I felt exalted. Here was a rostrum! One night Daddy came home with most of the University of Alabama